The B2B SaaS PM playbook I wish I had on day 1

No one really prepares you for B2B product management — there is no handbook for stepping into a live product with paying customers, multiple ongoing implementations with a flood of feature requests, bunch of stakeholders and a roadmap that seems both stuck and evolving at the same time. I have been there trying to look confident and at the same time quietly Googling acronyms in meetings. These are a few things that I wish someone had told me before I started managing B2B SaaS products.

Let’s assume a new product manager joins a B2B company — the product is already live and has some customers. It usually takes a while to understand the product, the business, and the ecosystem. But in most cases, PMs don’t give themselves (or aren’t given) enough time to grasp the core value proposition or deeply understand the customer. It gets even tougher if the PM is new to the domain. In a rush to prove themselves, they just jump in.

Here’s what typically follows:

1. Trying to Build a Faster Horse

Without understanding the “why”, PMs start accepting “solutions” from customers or internal stakeholders. The problem? They forget that the solution space belongs to the product team. Your job is to understand the customer’s problem, not blindly build what they’re asking for. Band-aid fixes are common — where you patch a symptom, but the root cause lies elsewhere.

Learning: Even if you’re new, make the extra effort to understand the business problem and its impact. I’ve made this mistake myself — initially, I would accept requests without questioning them, afraid of appearing inexperienced. But it’s always better to ask “dumb” questions early than to build something useless later. Frameworks like the “Five Whys” and “User Journey Mapping” might seem basic, but they’re often the most useful when you’re trying to untangle complex problems.

2. Configurations vs Customizations

In B2B, especially across industries, every customer has their own way of working. One of the trickiest jobs is figuring out what should be a configuration vs a customization. Too many configurations? Your product becomes hard to test and maintain. Too many customizations? You lose core product innovation velocity. It takes time to strike the right balance, especially if you’re new to the domain. One of the most challenging balancing acts I faced was navigating between my engineering manager and the implementation leads — especially during UAT cycles. That’s typically when new configuration or customization needs emerge, often driven by edge cases or things that didn’t come up earlier. On one hand, there’s pressure to honor prior commitments and close implementation gaps quickly. On the other, there’s the responsibility to stay on track with the core product roadmap. With finite engineering capacity, this becomes a strategic decision point.

Learning: As a PM, your role is to evaluate whether the request aligns with the long-term product vision and if it benefits multiple customers. If not, the goal should be to introduce scalable hooks or modular components — without bloating the product with one-off exceptions. This is where the product manager needs to balance the short-term delivery pressures with long-term product health.

3. Understanding the Competition

In B2B products, understanding what competitors are doing is tough. Unlike B2C, where everything’s public — B2B products often don’t share feature sets, pricing, or implementation details openly. In my early PM days, I was honestly lost when it came to understanding competitor products. The competitor websites were filled with vague jargons and buzzwords.

Learning: Competitive insight comes from gathering clues from multiple sources — from marketing decks, webinar demos, customer case studies, analyst reports (like Gartner, Forrester), and feedback from your sales team. These small breadcrumbs help piece together the competitive landscape. These fragmented insights may not give you a complete picture, but they help you build a strong understanding about where your competitors are heading and where the gaps lie.

4. Requirements From the Sales Team

When roadmap discussions begin, the sales team often steps in with a “crystal clear” feedback based on their interactions with customers and through competitor demos. A new PM would say “yes” to the sales team request too quickly — often because they are still building the product and domain acumen and don’t want to block a potential deal. The sales input is valuable, no doubt. After all sales is at the front, hearing what customers want and where your product lags. But the PM must take it with a pinch of salt. Sales doesn’t always have the full context behind why a customer asked for something.

Learning: One of the most impactful changes I made was starting to involve myself earlier in the sales cycle — not as a full-time sales resource, but selectively. These interactions with potential customers gave me real context on pain points, helped me understand what they were actually asking for, and made it easier to handle feature requests more thoughtfully. It also helped prevent over-promising from the sales side, because both sides started understanding the limits and strengths of the product better. But a word of caution here — PMs shouldn’t be in every sales call. Your job is still to stay put in the product strategy. But that regular presence can create massive clarity — for the PM, for sales, and for the customer.

5. PM’s Own List is Missing

In the constant every day hustle, you rarely get time to sit with users and observe how they use the product. You’re flooded with requests, triaging issues, managing backlogs — and somewhere, your own list of product ideas disappears. At the start, I would never get time for any reflection on the product/roadmap/strategy. The time would be distributed between managing stakeholders, sales discussions, supporting implementation teams, pricing, prioritsing the current roadmap, explaining requirements to the technical teams etc.

Learning: I had to cautiously take a break and define “Silent hours” multiple times a week to get some sanity to the chaos. Block your calendar for yourself to do some deep thinking, beyong the day-to-day grind. Reflect on what needs to be improved, not just what’s being asked. Always remember that the best PMs are domain experts, know the product inside out, and are the ones who spot problems no one else has noticed yet.

Overall Thoughts

Being a B2B PM is messy, nuanced, and maybe not as flashy as B2C — but it’s where some of the most meaningful problems are solved. My biggest takeaway? Be curious, be patient, and don’t lose your product sense under pressure.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/the-b2b-saas-pm-playbook-i-wish-i-had-on-day-1-691b675d3007